Tasmania’s forests

Logging on

Tony Abbott reignites an environmental battle

MOST people believed the island state of Tasmania had at last found peace after a 30-year war between environmentalists and loggers. Both sides signed a deal two years ago that gave everyone something: secure supplies for timber companies and protection for native forests.

Now, though, Tony Abbott, Australia’s prime minister, has reignited the war. Australia, he says, has too much “locked-up forest”. Mr Abbott wants to open up a swathe of Australia’s most fought-over forest and hand it to loggers. His government has asked UNESCO to remove 74,000 hectares (183,000 acres) from the World Heritage-listed wilderness region that covers about a fifth of Tasmania.

On March 15th the Liberal Party, a pro-logging soul mate of Mr Abbott’s federal conservative coalition, swept to power in Tasmania’s state election. Will Hodgman, the new premier, vows to do Canberra’s bidding and tear up the peace deal. After 16 years in opposition, the Liberals reduced the centre-left Labor Party to six seats in the 25-seat parliament. But, despite Mr Hodgman’s strong mandate, ripping up the forest deal will not be easy.

Mr Abbott laid the groundwork in a speech on March 4th to a gathering of forest-industry grandees in Canberra. The environment, he told them, “is meant for man, and not just the other way around”. He saw loggers not as “environmental bandits”, but as “people who are the ultimate conservationists”. Even for a leader who has made political combat his hallmark, this was provocative stuff.

The areas Mr Abbott wants to strip from World Heritage listing belong to 170,000 hectares that the organisation recognised only last year. This approval brought to about 1.5m hectares the World Heritage-listed wilderness region covering central and south-west Tasmania. This latest addition was a crucial part of the 2012 peace deal, known as the Tasmanian Forests Agreement, signed by timber companies, unions and green groups.

Forests cover half of Tasmania: in Australia as a whole it is less than a quarter. Battles over access to the land harmed the logging industry. Fearing that supplies would be disrupted, customers in Asia had started looking elsewhere for their timber. For this reason alone, many loggers welcomed the calm that came with the peace as much as greens did. Ta Ann, a Malaysian-based outfit that turns eucalyptus logs into veneer, says it was ready to quit Tasmania, but the peace deal persuaded it to stay.

Mr Hodgman plans talks with timber companies, although his ideas for managing the island’s forests remain a mystery. He will not include environmental groups, he says, unless they drop their demand to stick to the peace deal. But the unlikely alliance created by the deal seems to have pre-empted the premier. Two days after the election, industry leaders, unions and environmentalists met in Hobart, Tasmania’s capital, to reaffirm their support for the agreement. Terry Edwards, head of the Forest Industries Association of Tasmania, which signed the deal, says it was “absolutely imperative” in giving the industry certainty. Mr Abbott’s talk of World Heritage excisions is “not warranted”, says Mr Edwards. Indeed, ditching the deal could upset its plan to certify Tasmanian timber to the sustainable international standards that many customers ask for.

Questions remain about Mr Abbott’s reasons for stripping 74,000 hectares from World Heritage listing. He suggests the entire area had already been logged, “degraded” or planted with timber to be logged. The Wilderness Society, one of the environmental groups that signed the deal, calculates that just 10% of the area had in fact been logged; about 40% was “old-growth” forest, barely disturbed before; and much of the rest was natural vegetation.

A real feller

At 7.6% Tasmania’s unemployment rate is Australia’s highest (compared with 6% nationally). Mr Abbott blames “Green ideology” for many of the island’s woes, even for Australia’s lowest life expectancy. He wants a “renaissance” of forestry in Tasmania. The industry employs around 4,000 people, about 2,000 fewer than six years ago. The Australia Institute, a think-tank, reckons that Tasmania’s industry can survive only with government subsidies. Delisting World Heritage regions, it argues, will create hardly any jobs. The World Heritage Committee is due to rule on the Abbott government’s request in June.